The X-Axis – 5 June 2011
Welcome to a comics post that, I promise, will not have anything to say about the upcoming DC relaunch. If you want some thoughts on that, just check the previous post for this week’s podcast, where we talk about it plenty. Plus, reviews of Flashpoint: Secret Seven, Criminal and 50 Girls 50.
Six X-books this week, though one of them’s pretty much completist-only territory, as well as both of the summer event titles and the wrap-up of Jonathan Ross’s comic… so let’s get to work.
Astonishing X-Men #39 – With the series alternating back and forth between two different storylines, this issue returns to Daniel Way’s “Monstrous”. And is any connection between the two stories apparent here? No. None whatsoever. I’m used by now to the X-Men titles not referring to one another, but an X-Men title that doesn’t even refer to itself… that’s quite something.
Interestingly, even though the arc is now on a bimonthly schedule, artist Jason Pearson is already gone, with Nick Bradshaw taking his place. Pearson’s interior art for this storyline has actually been quite good, but heaven only knows what he was thinking with this issue’s cover, a baffling scrawl which has thoughtfully been rendered in the darkest available colours to make sure nobody can see it properly. Bradshaw drew this year’s Uncanny X-Men Annual – the chapter of “Escape from the Negative Zone” that I actually liked – and I’m glad to see him getting some higher profile work here. There’s a degree of distortion that won’t be to everyone’s taste, but he does good character work, and rather nice monsters in an Art Adams kind of way.
This is fundamentally a throwaway story about the X-Men fighting monsters controlled by an obscure villain, Mentallo, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Daniel Way’s got the right idea here – keep it simple and have fun with it. It’s a basic concept that allows for plenty of action, and for the human drama, there’s a subplot of whether Armor is here because it’s her duty as an X-Man, or just because she wants to get away from her family. Keeping the cast to just four X-Men lets it remain nice and focussed (it’s remarkable how often the quality of X-Men stories improves when they don’t try to find roles for everyone).
There’s a bit in the middle with Cyclops and Wolverine that doesn’t really work – or make sense, frankly. Cyclops takes Wolverine aside to discuss what Armor is up to. Wolverine claims that Cyclops is actually talking about Jean Grey, and claims that that’s why Scott wanted to take them aside (i.e., to avoid Emma). But Cyclops’ question makes more sense at face value, has nothing obviously to do with Jean, and clearly couldn’t be asked in front of Armor either… so Wolverine comes across as making a bizarre logical leap, and the overall impression is that there’s some idea in here that Way failed to get across properly.
Still, on the whole it’s a good enough X-Men story, helped by some strong art, an unaccustomed sense of focus, and a clever moment finding a cute use for Armor’s powers.
Fear Itself #3 – Yeah, this isn’t working for me. Sure, Stuart Immonen’s art is great. And there’s an okay Thor story at the centre. But it only gets 5 pages of the issue; the rest is more Blitzkrieg USA stuff, with random heroes fighting random henchmen and nothing discernible at stake until they apparently kill someone at the end in an attempt to convince us that any of this matters. Pretty, yes. Remotely interesting as a story, no.
Flashpoint #2 – Now, this isn’t exactly Watchmen either, and personally I’d take Immonen’s art over Andy Kubert’s. But it’s a better comic nonetheless. Both Marvel and DC have arguably taken a story which properly belongs in one title – Thor for Marvel, Flash for DC – and artificially extended it to justify a line-wide crossover. But the difference is that where Fear Itself has allowed that stuff to swamp the core story, Flashpoint more or less ignores it and leaves it for the tie-in minis to deal with. Half of this book is about Steve Trevor and Deathstroke travelling to Europe and getting caught up in the war between Atlantis and the Amazons, which… well, isn’t that interesting in itself, but pushes the story along and does set up some questions about how Wonder Woman and Aquaman both ended up so out of character. But the other half is Barry Allen trying to trying to convince Batman to help him out, and that’s very well done – including a cliffhanger which is both laugh-out-loud audacious, and sets up a real mystery of where the hell the book can possibly be going from here.
Flashpoint: Secret Seven #1 – We reviewed this on the podcast, but I’ll raise it again here, because it’s an example of just how peripheral some of these tie-in minis appear to be. What does Secret Seven have to do with the plot of Flashpoint? Well, pretty much nothing, so far – there’s a passing mention of the fact that Cyborg tried to recruit Shade to help him, and that’s about it. On the other hand, there are other elements in here that might turn out to be significant; we’re told in terms that Shade exists in multiple realities at once, for example, which doesn’t seem to have any thematic importance, so presumably serves the plot.
Despite the title, this isn’t a team book at all; it’s a Shade the Changing Man miniseries, by Peter Milligan and (mostly) George Perez. Milligan did some of his best work on Vertigo’s Shade the Changing Man, particularly in the first four years or so, but he’s also always embraced the subtitle by drastically reinventing his lead character as he goes along. This version of Shade seems to be primarily based on the Steve Ditko original, but with elements from Milligan’s original Vertigo take hovering around the edges. Perez turns out to be a great choice of artist, since the Ditko “madness” visuals are so wildly at odds with his usual style that they seem all the more anomalous and weird. It’s arguably not so much a story as a Shade character piece, but with Milligan writing that’s usually no bad thing.
Turf #5 – The end of Jonathan Ross and Tommy Lee Edwards’ miniseries, clocking in at a very respectable 35 pages, no ads (for $3.99, but still). I remember that when issue #1 came out, I had some vague ideas that it might be trying to say something about prohibition – but yeah, ultimately those elements fade to the background and we get “everyone teams up to fight the real baddies”. Oh, and a tongue-in-cheek set-up for a possible sequel.
I’m not sure quite what to make of this, looking back. It’s very much a 70s throwback, both in terms of the density of the story, and the use of narration, which sometimes veers a little too far in the direction of outright pastiche. On the other hand, it also feels like a book where everyone’s having fun, if only by doing a deliberately pulpy story. The plot may end up being sheer melodrama, but at least some work has been put into constructing it so that the plot threads dovetail nicely, and Ross deserves credit for doing something more that has nothing whatsoever to do with his established TV persona. It does turn out to be a rather slight story, and there’s potential in the early issues which isn’t fully realised, but it’s certainly more than just a celebrity vanity comic.
Uncanny X-Force #11 – Officially this is the first chapter of “The Dark Angel Saga”, though to all intents and purposes it really started with last issue’s prologue. In order to save Warren, X-Force need a macguffin which can only be found in the Age of Apocalypse timeline, so they hook up with the Dark Beast to travel there. Rick Remender isn’t really interested in the mechanics of how you get there either, so that’s treated as a matter of casual ease. Needless to say, once we get to the said dystopia, it’s a Chase the Macguffin story, livened up by letting Wolverine and Psylocke meet the X-Men from this world. (Deadpool and Fantomex get to meet them as well, but they don’t really care so much.) Remender also remembers that Psylocke spent time with the AoA version of Sabretooth in Exiles, though whether the references to that are clear enough to make sense to new readers, I’m not sure.
As usual, despite its remit to be the dark and violent book, X-Force avoids falling into the trap of excessive murk and angst. At bottom, Remender is just having fun here doing an alternate world and a chase story. The art does veer a bit on the sombre side, and the colouring is a little too mired in the brown/grey murk that traditionally says “Take this seriously, now”, but on the whole it’s a decent issue.
Wolverine/Hercules: Myths, Monsters and Mutants #4 – This would be the completist-only book that I mentioned in the introduction. Not because it’s particularly bad, but… well, it’s a Wolverine/Hercules team-up miniseries, set in past continuity, and acting as a sequel to a story Wolverine wasn’t even in. The days when a loyal audience would pick up this sort of book anyway are long behind us. Marvel seem to be moving away from this sort of project and towards simply running extra issues of the regular titles; in the short term that’s probably for the best, though it doesn’t really address the more fundamental questions connected with the overexpansion of the line.
To be fair to Frank Tieri, he’s certainly tried to give this story a bit of dramatic weight. Unfortunately, he’s tried to do that by using it to tie up the long-forgotten subplot about Matsuo Tsurayaba being tormented by Wolverine each year. And that plot was already tied up in last year’s Psylocke miniseries. I know editors are less bothered about cross-title continuity than they used to be, but for heaven’s sake, is it that hard to avoid commissioning two different miniseries to resolve the same subplot? Tieri’s resolution would actually have worked fine in isolation; I have a sneaking suspicion that the last page was tacked on to avoid creating a major continuity clash with Psylocke, but it’s a good scene anyway.
That aside, much of the series has been a perfectly acceptable team-up romp, and for the most part the same applies in this issue. Unfortunately, the big finish is rather botched, first with a page of incomprehensible artwork that ruins a key moment, and then an anticlimactic ending with Pluto showing up to sort everything out.
X-23 #11 – More of Jubilee and X-23 in Paris, and as you’d imagine, Jubilee’s being used here to further explore the “nature vs nurture” theme which lies at the heart of this book. Unfortunately, in another example of questionable inter-title editing, Marjorie Liu seems to think that Jubilee’s character arc as a vampire involves everyone on Utopia being shunning her, with her being in denial about her condition, until she finally left Utopia and got a sense of perspective. That, of course, is pretty much the exact opposite of the character arc we saw in the Wolverine & Jubilee miniseries and the epilogue issue in X-Men itself – and even in this continuity-lite era, there’s really no excuse for getting that sort of thing wrong.
Anyway, X-23 has a death wish of sorts, X-23 goes shopping for normal girl clothes, everyone investigates villains doing something with the trigger scent from the previous arc… it’s a fairly typical issue, livened up by some interesting art from Sana Takeda. I’m starting to get the feeling, though, that as with Marjorie Liu’s work on Daken, there’s a lot of navel-gazing from the lead character here, but no actual progression beneath it all.
X-Factor #220 – A Sin-Eater story? That’s a concept that echoes back to the “Death of Jean DeWolff” story that Peter David wrote for Spider-Man in the 1980s, but here it seems to be a demon thingy that’s sent out to face Shatterstar and Wolfsbane. Now, if ever there’s a character who ought to be worried about her fate in the afterlife, it’s Wolfsbane; devout puritanism used to be her defining character trait back in the day, and by any standards she’s deviated pretty severely from what she still claims to believe in. There’s also some good stuff in this issue with the two leads – David’s really found a hook on Shatterstar by playing up his showman tendencies. And he’s being entirely true to Rob Liefeld’s original conception of the character, merely doing it in a subtler and more humorous way.
That said, this is still one of those stories where a mystical character shows up to spell out a Theme for the slow members of the class, and while I’m glad to see it being foreshadowed as a longer-term direction to be explored with Rahne’s character, it’s also done in a rather heavy-handed way, at least by Peter David’s standards.
X-Men #12 – Part two of “First and Last”, the Evolutionaries storyline. (Note to Marvel: you know how the first part of this storyline appeared in a special, rather than in issue #11? Try mentioning that on the recap page. You never know, you might actually sell some comics.)
So, the Evolutionaries have shown up on Utopia, and we cut back and forth between this encounter and what happened when the X-Men talked to them in the Silver Age. The Evolutionaries, it seems, are obsessed with finding somebody to deal with claims to speak for the mutant race. Professor X never fit that description, but in line with the last few years of stories, Cyclops does. Unfortunately, as the Evolutionaries point out, Cyclops’ tenure as leader of the mutant race has pretty much been one catastrophe after another. Perhaps he might like to consider his position.
I like the basic idea of this storyline. Aside from being a nice way of showing up how much the X-Men have changed since the 1960s, it plays neatly off some core themes both of the series as a whole and the last few years of stories. Unfortunately, at least in the present day sequences, it’s also falling prey to the same problem that plagued Matt Fraction’s run on Uncanny – a veritable horde of characters resulting in a lack of focus. I also question the wisdom of having the Eternals show up in a prehistoric flashback to explain the plot with no explanation of who they are or what they’re up to. Unless the story’s going to get back to them in later chapters, that’s surely going to confuse the hell out of readers who don’t recognise the characters.
The story suffers a bit from sprawl, then, but at least there are strong concepts in here.
I didn’t even know a new X-Factor was out. So, thanks for cluing me in some. I wish the series got the respect it should, by both other critics, and Marvel itself. Also, yeah, Flashpoint #2 does end on a pretty hilarious point.
I enjoyed X-Factor this week, despite my initial reservations about the art. I found it ugly to begin with but quickly warmed to it as it seemed to fit the story and characters featured. That being said, when was the last time this book had an artist that did more than two or three issues in a row? Is there a reason NONE of the many artists that have illustrated these pages in the last couple of years could have stayed around – it’s not like any of them have regular gigs. I just don’t Marvel’s insistence that X-Factor seems to be prime place of rotating artists.
And as much as I was hesitant to like X-Force, I actually do. A lot. This title reminds me of the X-Men I used to love (minus the violence). A set, manageable cast with different types of adventure – and high stakes. It’s quickly becoming my favorite X-title.
X-Factor’s actually been pretty consistent lately, Valentine DeLandro and Emanuela Lupacchino have drawn 30 of the past 36 issues or so.
so about Fear Itself…
It is becoming obvious to me that this “event” was never meant to be more than a couple issues of Thor and Captain America (Those comics aren’t even tying into the story) and is being stretched way to thin. We keep being told that this climate of fear and unease is everywhere but it just isn’t there (but the recap pages make it seem a major point).
The story is so thin and the added points are being used to justify the tie-ins so there is no meat to this mini.
‘Fear Itself’ has been exactly the same kind of mess Fraction made of ‘Uncanny X-Men’: a sprawling, incoherent handling of a big idea that sounds good in the recap page but doesn’t actually go anywhere in the book itself. Immonen’s art is about the only thing worth mentioning in the series thus far.
And I still can’t figure out where any of the “Holy Crap” moments are in issue #3 that Fraction kept pimping in all the lead-up interviews.
Concerning X-Factor: how many issues a month does PAD put out? I feel like there’s a new issue every week. Can’t wait to see what he does with [surprise guest character]. I thought she was dead.
I think the holy crap moments for fear itself are the death of Bucky and the Thing getting a hammer. The Thing turns heel at the midpoint of the issue and then gets shunted off to a mini. These avatars of the serpent get two pages then we are told to by a mini to see what happens next. We have no idea what the serpent is or where it is heading and next month is the half way mark.
The death of Bucky is what I feel will be the only lasting effect of this event but I think Brubaker is already writing him out in Cap with a more fitting story.
Feral was de-powered by Mday and killed by Loeb.
I was afraid Bucky was going to be the one killed in FEAR ITSELF. So after all the time and investment in bringing him back…they kill him off again? That’s just wrong.
Bucky ‘dying’ wasn’t very clear, I have to say. He basically got beat up a lot, and if he was supposed to be deceased at issue end, that didn’t really come across at all. I thought maybe they’d have a big dramatic “Let’s Try To Save Him” sequence in the next issue and THEN he’d die, but I was not left with the impression, at issue’s end, that he was no longer among the living. If that WAS his death, then that was pretty weak sauce.
And the stuff with Ben wasn’t all that shocking as it has been pretty openly telegraphed in adverts, interviews, and in the book itself.
I guess I was just hoping for something a bit more unexpected.
And if Loeb is the one who killed Feral (i guess I vaguely recall her dying in the mega-atrocious Romulus intro in ‘Wolverine’), then that explains that. PAD’s bringing her back is just him doing what he can to help us pretend that story never happened.
I picked up Astonishing X-Men #39 on account of Bradshaw’s art, and I was wondering the same thing about the Cyclops/Wolverine conversation.
Way also has a bad habit of making Wolverine too cool for school, one upping Cyclops all the time. It becomes very apparent after a while and he needs to cool it on that front.
Bucky has a big old hole in his chest from Skadi ramming the haft of her hammer into it at the end of Fear Itself; while that’s certainly survivable for a comic book character, I thought his injury looked fatal enough to justify it if he does turn out to be dead. She basically staked him through the heart.
On X-Factor: Sin Eaters are a part of folklore. They’re not generally big demon thingies, but the concept predates the Death of Jean DeWolff by centuries. They just happen to be referring to the same legends. (Coincidentally, Jean DeWolff just turned up in another comic this week – I won’t say which to avoid spoiling it for anyone who hasn’t read it – in a moment that would have packed much more meaning for me if I’d remembered who the heck she was. If only I’d read this review before the issue in question).
Having deleted Wolverine #50 from my memory, I was unaware that Feral was supposed to be dead. She was an good character in the Nicieza X-Force; I remember her origin in particular being quite harrowing. She and her sister Thornn were interesting in that Thornn, a nominal “bad guy” was much more sane and reliably human than the easily enraged, animalistic Feral, the nominal “good guy.” Of course, Feral turned bad without an awful lot of prodding in the end.
The origin story is well worth tracking down if you can find it. It’s X-Force #41. Great example of a story where a villain is sympathetic while still being obviously in the wrong.
On the topic of Ken B.’s comment on Astonishing:
Does anyone else get the feeling that Schism is going to turn out to be way too much like Civil War, with each side allegedly having a valid point but the writing very obviously in the corner of the anti-authoritarian side to the point of villifying half of the heroes involved?
Astonishing X-Men related trivia of interest only to me: Back in the ’80s, TSR (the company responsible for Dungeons & Dragons at the time) put out a Marvel Superheroes Role-Playing Game that published adventures that, unlike most RPG adventures, assumed the players were using established characters instead of ones they made themselves. The first one was “Breeder Bombs” featuring the X-Men, and it features Mentallo prominently. He was probably chosen for the adventure simply because he was a mutant with little previous connection to the X-Men (both of which are plot points) but because it was the first time I’d ever heard of the character, I’ve always associated him with the X-Men. And I don’t think I’ve seen him in much of anything since then.
My point is that every review I’ve read of the current Astonishing arc points out how obscure and random Mentallo seems (which is true), but to me, Mentallo is closely related to the X-Men because of that one module.
Told you that would only be of interest to me.
I find Fear Itself solid. It’s not Fraction’s best work but, much like his non-Ages of Thunder Thor work, I’m still finding things to enjoy. Maybe I’m cutting the guy too much slack because he’s written things I’ve loved, I don’t know. As far as Bucky’s death goes, it didn’t seem that muddled or ambiguous to me.
Mike makes a good point about X-Force’s compact casts. It does share a welcome similarity with the post Dark Phoenix team that made me a fan all those years ago in size. Even though I’ve liked a lot of Rick Remender’s work in the past, I am surprised by how much I’ve taken to this series, too. It’s my only X-title at the moment and I’m perfectly happy with that (although I will probably check out Schism based on the creative team).
I’d guess the strange exchange we got between Cyclops and Wolverine in Astonishing is related what Way said here.
http://marvel.com/news/story/14935/tuesday_qa_daniel_way
“Daniel Way: What I think is most fascinating about Emma right now is that we’re able to see her from multiple angles. We’re about to see how she’s caring and tender with her relationship with Scott. ***As much as it hangs on the razor’s edge,*** there’s some real emotion there.”
Some foreshadowing perhaps? Or just the generic Jean teases?
I, for one, am enjoying Fear Itself, but my expectations are low, I suppose. It’s not really *about* anything, other than being a big, summer blockbuster-type story, but I like those. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Grant Morrison’s JLA: overwhelming threat, worldwide crisis, heroes doing impossible things (presumably).
Some of the minis have done a good job with the whole ‘climate of fear’ thing. Which, yeah, is a problem but not enough of one to matter much to me. (Actually, I’ve dug each of the minis that I’ve read. Maybe I’m just a mark for this stuff.)
ZZZ I only know Mentallo from the superhero Top Trumps put out in the mid-80’s, but my friends and myself spent hours playing with those, so he’s not obscure to me either, even if I’ve never seen him in a comic.
I have to say, maybe just because I’m old, but the conversation between Scott and Logan seemed to be a direct reference to the similarities between what Armor did (saving them from the crash) and what Jean did in (pre-Uncanny) X-Men #100, saving the ship on the way from Starcore and in the process taking a huge risk and in the process becoming insanely powerful. If that was unintentional, well, us old timers always read too much into this shit.
Also, the whole “is she fighting the monster just to avoid her family” thing was absurd on the face of it because, you know, she was the only one who had the power to fight the dragon who was demolishing Tokyo and probably killing people by the hundreds. I’m certain that any reasonable person would agree that trying to save thousands of lives is a perfectly reasonable excuse to skip out early on a funeral.
That was pretty ludicrous.
“If you’re not saving Tokyo for the right reason, maybe you shouldn’t be saving Tokyo at all. That attitude better improve, young lady, or I will turn this battle around and take you home right now.”
ok so reading an interview about issue 3 of Fear Itself and there was supposed to be more drama attached to The Thing destroying Yancy street.
tdubs: what site is that interview on?
I always liked the idea of Wolverine’s ongoing revenge on Matsuo. I like the idea that Wolverine’s still doing it between the pages over the years.
Also, I’m not reading Fear itself, but I’m trade-waiting on Captain America. I hope he doesn’t get killed off in someone else’s book, Brubaker should do it if it’s going to happen, that will read terribly in years to come when people rediscover the Cap run.
I keep hearing d=great things about X-Force, but I really hate Deadpool, so I’ve avoided it.
Deadpool is great in X-Force. Not so over the top that he overwhelms the scenes he’s in, and there have been some glimpses at his serious side too. X-Force is the only title I’ve ever read that tried to present Deadpool as an actual person.
Fear Itself is such a sloppy, underwhelming, half-hearted mess. It’s painfully obvious that someone at Marvel looked at the calendar, said “Oh shit, we need a crossover, don’t we? What movies do we have coming up? Captain America and Thor? How ’bout a thing where Captain America gets hit with a Thor-hammer? We can do that, right?”
@Nostalgia: The original DEADPOOL ongoing series took the character seriously. It’s pretty much the defining take on him for all stories that use him as more than just comic relief.
RE: Deadpool
Remender is writing a faaar more grounded version of him in X-Force, and although its still all kinds of cuckoo bananas, I’d highly recommend David Lapham’s DeadpoolMax series, which is also presenting very humanized version of Wade. Quite frankly, it wasn’t until Daniel Way and his little clown posse started writing the 27 Deadpool on-goings that it became the norm to just write him as a 1-dimensional cartoon character. There’s actually a great character in there when a decent writer is at the helm.
Re: Bucky
I read an interview over at Newsarama with Fraction and Brubaker (you know, one of those Q&A’s where all involved parties grin and joke while towing the party line), and Brubaker actually says he was excited Fraction got to kill him off in “Fear Itself” because that’s what would lend that story the requisite gravitas. Its kind of depressing. Brubaker actually says that killing Bucky at the end of his current ‘Captain America’ storyline was in the cards all along, and the entire Bucky-Cap run has been building to this. You can almost see his slumping down in his seat and muttering, “but I’m glad the climax of my story gets to be in Matt Fraction’s book.” Somebody give that guy a hug.
I’m getting that sinking feeling about comics…the same one the industry had in the 70s and 90s: “its all going to end soon, so what’s the point of trying?”
@clay
Over at CBR they have a recap of a Q&A Fraction did at a con this weekend.
Re: Uncanny X-force I know the answer will upset and disappoint me but, how does the ‘age of apocalypse’ still exist?
I wish I was buying DC comics so I could stop buying them in disgust!
Although I have been picking up Northlanders (DC Vertigo) and it is ace.
@Mike-EL
I think comics will be ending for me soon, at least. DC’s September plans may make just the changes that make me say goodbye to the few DC titles that I still read, without making enough changes to the others to get me to pick them up.
Marvel’s been teasing a Scott/Emma split since they got together, and that might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for X-Men for me, because I’m darn certain it will be trading something that works for something worse. (It isn’t just that, but that the line as a whole is so weak that only such small things hold me to it.) Majorie Liu has killed any interest I have in X-23, which is something that Kyle/Yost couldn’t even manage. My cosmic line interest is dying as Annihilators is a complete dud to me.
Sadly, I actually have to sit and think to remember what books I actually get from DC and Marvel these days.
Fear Itself has been terrible, as Paul says, just bombast and noise hiding a potentially pretty good Thor story. It reminds me of Blackest Night in style and quality, with lots of splash pages of characters we’re supposed to care about because we’ve been reading comics for thirty years, not because this particular comic has made them interesting. The death in #3 was completely unprepared for within the book (that said, I can see how the eventual death of Bucky is the natural conclusion of Brubaker’s cap run — but he really should have died in a way Steve Rogers could blame himself for!)
Ditto all that about X-FORCE and Deadpool.
And yeah, if I were a CAPTAIN AMERICA reader (nevermind its writer), I’d be pretty damn pissed that the Death of Bucky got shanghaied by a completely unrelated crossover.
I think it’s kind of a failure that Bucky’s “death” wasn’t even clear to people who read the actual comic, let alone people who read CAP and had no idea that something like this was actually going to happen in the crossover title. I seriously had no idea he was supposed to be dead at the end of the last issue – I mean, I was surprised that the kid “survived” getting half his head blown off in that issue of WALKING DEAD so I guess my ability to predict when and when not the writers will chose to be “plausible” is completely shot.
I’d read the spoilers that Bucky died in that issue and I read and STILL thought “Oh, he’s not dead after all”. Then I read the Captain America #1 previews with the funeral of a different character and decided that, yup, he’s definitely not dead. Sure, he looks badly injured, but that happens all the time. I think the key to this is that Fraction completely fails to make this moment seem like a big deal. It feels like a routine story beat, and that’s why it didn’t even occur to either of us that he could really be dead, even when I already knew he was!
See also: tie-in titles like HERC which seem to think this is a story about a climate of fear and anger, despite the utter failure of the main series to set up anything of the sort.
I try and avoid the publicity teases so I didn’t know Bucky was supposedly on the chopping block. If that was really Bucky’s death, then they royally messed up a really good years long story. As a Cap reader, I’m currently in the middle of a Bucky trapped in the gulag storyline. So is this supposed to be he gets out, gets sent to defend Washington with just Black Widow and Falcon (that’s the best defense they could come up with for the Capital, Steve is so concerned about?) and dies? Any drama that should be there for that story is totally ruined.
I agree with Thomas, that as I read it I didn’t really think he was getting killed. I actually still have a hard time believing they did all this work to build up Bucky as a character to just dispose of him. It may still be a publicity feint from Marvel and he just goes underground.
Paul, I’m not sure where else to ask this of you –
Is there anywhere that I can still read and access all of the reviews and commentaries that were a part of your website The X-Axis (www.thexaxis.com)? I have enormously fond memories of regularly patronizing that site, and I would love to revisit all of those awesome write-ups!
Steve, try putting it through archive.org. You should be able to access most, if not all, of the X-Axis there.
Thank you so much, kelvingreen! I had never heard of this archive.org, but I’ve just whiled away an hour revisiting the old X-Axis… This was something I had totally given up on! I learn something new every day.
@DonWok
That’s really a good question, and it kind of bothered me too, but Exiles established a while back that the Age of Apocalypse world still exists out there somewhere (the Blink and Sabretooth of AoA were members of the Exiles) so at least X-Force is picking up an existing anomoly, not creating a new one.
Taken at face value, the continued existence of the AoA would seem to shift the events of AoA from “Legion changes history and only Bishop remembers the way the world is supposed to be until the heroes set things right” to “Legion accidentally shunts Bishop off to a parallel dimension until the heroes send him home.” Of course, Marvel Universe time travel is alway supposed to work on principle of altering the past only creating divergent timelines, and so every possible future still happens somewhere and the best a time-traveller can hope to do is end up in one of the better ones. Which, again, sort of blunts the point of Age of Apocalypse.
What I think is the party line, though, it that there are infinite parallel realities in the Marvel Multiverse, which means there are several that are just slight variations on Earth-616 and several that are slight variations on AoA. I think Legion’s mistake turned Earth-616 into an Earth-AoA. So X-Force isn’t technically going to the “real” Age of Apocalypse, just a dimension that’s functionally identical to it.
What was the address of the X-Axis before it was http://www.thexaxis.com? I’d like to go waaaay back with this archive.org thingie 🙂
ZZZ,
That’s one fine explanation. I’m a little worried about myself that it made sense to me!
So what you’re saying ZZZ, is that the current AoA is actually a timeline in which Legion caused the Age of Apocalypse (altering that timeline’s reality in the same way 616 was altered). But the divergent point of that timeline is that things WERE NOT reversed as they were in 616?
I like it ^_^
There were a couple of “return to the AoA” stories in X-Man a while before Exiles.
Just seen a wordless preview from Schism posted on scansdaily.
My first reaction was ‘oh noes a New X-Men Morrison character that hasn’t already been given a hefty kicking by Marvel returns’
But then I saw Jason Aaron was writing and…I kind of have faith in the guy to pull this off.
what is the significance of feral showing up in x-factor? i know generally who she is, but does she have a connection to rhane? if feral is supposed to be dead, is it possible that this is just the demon-thingy taking on her form? that would only make sense if rhane and feral had some history together.
about AoA still being around: i think there was a miniseries, and the story was that phoenix something something something and now AoA exists as a parallel universe or something.
Kingderella: I think Feral’s appearance is just a cliffhanger that will lead to some awesome PAD-style character-rehabilitation.
Peter David has a knack for salvaging ill-concieved or poorly written or otherwise neglected characters and turning them into something quite interesting. See: Madrox, Strong Guy, Shatterstar, Layla Miller, Darwin, etc…
I have no idea what the mechanics will be behind her resurrection, but the character needs some TLC after the ignominious death written by Jeph Loeb.
I’m keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that PAD will dig up Skin next. He seems to have a thing for old New Mutants/X-Force/Gen X characters.
The great AoA is still around mystery:
1: In the Yoshida/Townsend miniseries, Jean Grey puts a stop to the the original AoA’s nuclear holocaust, so that’s okay.
2: In the Beast story ‘Endangered Species’ Forge has built a Time Looker-Sideways Tube, which shows that M-Day propagated across all dimensions. AoA specifically is shown to have no remaining mutants. M-Day didn’t have legs though and everybody’s ignoring it, so that’s okay.
However,
3: In an old ‘What If’ issue, ‘What If the Age of Apocalypse hadn’t Ended?’, Galactus shows up and eats the Earth anyway so the survivors flee into outer space on flying saucers.
@Steve.
There’s been a link posted in the comments sections of a few posts months ago, if you want to do the work to track it down, that has the entire (or almost the entire) x-acis archive in a rar or zip file. I don’t have the link any more, but I think it was on zshare or megaupload or something. I wish Paul would put a link up to it. Also, there always looking the really pre-website reviews up on r.a.c.m.xbooks (or whatever it was, I can’t even remember, surprisingly). There was (possibly still is) a yahoo group that Paul would send them out on.
The various attempts to revisit/sequelize Age of Apocalypse always leave me groaning. Much of the fun of the original AoA was its novelty; these characters, these settings, these rejiggered relationships – they don’t have a fraction of the impact when you bring them out for a sad little reprise.
@Jacob:
I’ve no such faith in Jason Aaron. It’s been clear from the few appearances that Quentin Quire’s made since Morrison’s run that post-Morrison writers have been content to treat him as a fairly straightforward villain. I don’t see Aaron using him as anything more than a plot device to get Schism started.